Revisiting the Nineteenth Century: The World, the Body, the Text The 14th Annual Conference of the R.O.C. English & American Literature Association

National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, TAIWAN, The Republic of China November 24~25, 2006

How much do we really know about nineteenth-century Britain and America? Do the cultures of the age still conjure up the same old vague impressions about gentlemanly conservatism, moral hypocrisy, oppressive domesticity, sexual repression, oversea expansion, literary routinism, fin-de-si&eacute;cle ennui? Our studies of the cultures in the century are still largely confined to context-free reading of writers who usually derived from unmistakably white, masculine, bourgeois (i.e., ¡§respectable¡¨) backgrounds. However, such reading inevitably excludes considerations of those socio-cultural factors like gender, class, race, whose significance in the formation of the English and American cultures is yet to be adequately explored. Indeed, studies of the cultures should go beyond a small cluster of ¡§key texts¡¨ and reach out for a wider range of cultural discourses; even the ¡§key texts¡¨ may have to be read against the cultural backdrops to which these texts originally responded. The nineteenth-century England and America witnessed one of the greatest upheavals, expansions, and oppressions in culture and economy of the West. Local or national subjects ventured away into various parts of the wider world and into contacts with racial, cultural, or class ¡§others.¡¨ Consciousness of the body was heightened when it was constantly brought into new stimulating environments and put under scrutiny from various perspectives. Texts were produced not just to record the experiences but to participate in these changes of perceptions. People, capital, ideas once flowed across the world and intertwined into a network of power/knowledge/desire that influenced not just the cores but the peripheries of the empires. So much more of the nineteenth-century world requires new and different scholarly efforts to bring it into consideration in our reconstruction of the historical period that still determined the ways of our world. We may find the nineteenth century more than a time of starched-collared gentlemen and crinoline-bound ladies always leading their materially comfortable lives in a rule-stifling, self-congratulatory way.

Papers should be 10-15 pages, in English or Chinese. Please send paper title, keywords, and abstract (maximum 500 words) to Cheng Kung University by May 10, 2006. Also include, on a separate paper, the proposer¡¦s name, address, phone number, fax number, email address, affiliation, and rank. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 20. Full papers are due November 1. Papers written in Chinese may be submitted to the R.O.C. English and American Literature Association¡¦s English and American Literature Review for possible publication. Inquiries may be addressed to Leslie Wu (phone and email below).